INTERNATIONAL AUTEUR ANIMATION FESTIVAL

IMAGINARIA

Imaginaria is an event that has gained an international scope and is part of a deep current of local cultural innovation.

Imaginaria is born, lives and transforms in the heart of the art city of Conversano, and in particular within spaces and venues of outstanding architectural and artistic value (Castello Aragonese, Complesso di San Benedetto, Complesso di San Giuseppe, the Cathedral square, historic piazzas).

The Community

An Event Made of People

Imaginaria is above all an event made of “people” and “places”, a community festival that enables and encourages everyone’s involvement. The evocative locations of Conversano’s medieval old town (churches, castle, historic streets and palaces) — open-air spaces of cultural enjoyment where the festival takes place — help create a unique and “familiar” atmosphere, considered one of the main elements of originality and thus the trait that positively distinguishes Imaginaria from other festivals.

This atmosphere is made up of a series of often-mentioned elements, including ease of “access”, proximity to directors and authors, and the high attendance of young people and children. This gives the festival an educational and outreach function, able to engage even a non-specialist audience (consider, for example, the film workshops carried out with schools and the training workshops with children, the exhibitions with illustrators, the live concerts for young people).

Imaginaria thus appears as a unique opportunity for the local community to broaden its cultural horizons and come into contact with other, even distant, worlds and cultures — both through film events and, more directly, through encounters with worlds parallel to animation cinema, namely illustration and auteur comics. To its visitors, Imaginaria thus appears as an experience of complete wellbeing, offering the chance to spend a cultural stay in an area with a rich tourist offer (cultural event, food and wine, art, history, leisure, environment and territory).

Thanks to its originality in form and content, the festival becomes an element of cross-cutting attraction and contamination between different audiences and visitors from other areas — not only from the Puglia region, but also and especially from other Italian regions and from foreign countries.

Guests

Distinguished National and International Guests

In recent years, Imaginaria has hosted in Conversano some of the most renowned figures in world animation cinema, alongside leading Italian directors, illustrators and authors.

Over more than twenty years of activity, and especially in the last decade, Imaginaria has built a network of high-profile cultural relationships, welcoming to Conversano world-renowned masters, authors awarded at major international festivals, and key figures of contemporary auteur animation.

Imaginaria is not just a screening venue, but a permanent laboratory for artistic exchange, a meeting point between authors and audiences, between local roots and a European outlook. The constant presence of distinguished national and international guests strengthens the Festival’s role as a cultural platform of excellence in Southern Italy, contributing to the growth of the area and the spread of animation culture as a contemporary, free and cross-cutting language.

In this ongoing dialogue between community and the international scene lies the most authentic identity of Imaginaria: a festival that combines artistic quality, European openness and local roots, building, year after year, a true international community of animation.

The Association

Atalante ets

The Atalante association, founded in 2001, has a track record of activities and experience in designing and producing film events, educational and training workshops, masterclasses, conferences, meetings with authors, and exhibitions.

Since 2003 it has organised Imaginaria – international festival of auteur animation cinema, unique in its kind in Puglia: the festival has established itself and is recognised among the most representative in the European landscape of sector festivals.

The Imaginaria festival is supported by the European Union’s Creative Europe Media programme, by the film festival promotion scheme of the MiC Directorate-General for Cinema, by the three-year call for cine-festivals of the Puglia Region and by the Municipality of Conversano, with the patronage of ASIFA Italia, Cartoon – European Association of Animation Film, and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (animation section) of Turin.

It has received the Medal of Representation of the President of the Republic three times in a row. In 2019 it was awarded the European quality mark EFFE Label 2019-2025 (Europe For Festivals, Festivals for Europe). Imaginaria is also an Oscar-qualifying festival: award-winning films in eligible categories gain the requirements to be considered for nomination at the Academy Awards.

It organises “Imaginaria Experience“, a training project funded by the ministerial call “CIPS – Cinema e Immagini per la Scuola”, involving thousands of students and teachers in the municipalities of Conversano, Modugno, Sammichele di Bari and Gioia del Colle.

Since 2020, under the artistic direction of Luigi Iovane, it has run the selection activities for the Catch The Moon animation film festival for students from the San Giovanni a Teduccio district of Naples.